The ‘Minecraft’ Movie Finds an ‘Always Sunny’ Director

Today in “extremely unlikely actors making their unlikely directorial debuts with unlikely projects,” we have It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia co-creator and star Rob McElhenney landing the Minecraft movie. If you are familiar with every element of that sentence then you know just how weird this news is.

The news comes to us via The Hollywood Reporter, who had no additional details on the project, including whether or not anything that was developed by Shawn Levy (who departed the project in December) is still in play.

McElhenney is best known for playing Mac on 12 seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Minecraft is best known as the video game that all of the kids are playing, where gamers can build complex worlds from scratch and then navigate them at their own peril. McElhenney, who has only a few credits to his name, seems like an odd choice for what is surely going to be a large and expensive tentpole movie…but it makes a weird kind of sense when you stop and think about it.

If the Minecraft movie is working off the template established by The LEGO Movie (and it is surely going off that template), then putting someone with a little bit of an edge to their work in the director’s seat is the right move. Much like how Phil Lord and Chris Miller brought their off-kilter sensibilities to what should have been a lame kids’ movie, McElhenney can enhance Minecraft with his own subversive tendencies.

Minecraft has no characters and no storyline, so the movie is going to build its narrative from scratch. In other words, the guy who plays Mac is going to hand-build his own fantasy story about a world where everything is hand-built. This should be interesting, at the very least.